Pat Howard: Football's grim toll coming into focus

A question that's top of mind for many professional football players these days is how much of their minds the game will eventually claim.

A question behind that one is how long football fans, especially the casual variety, will find entertainment in watching the damage being done. It's getting harder to rationalize.

Joe Thomas is a hoss even by the Darwinian standards of the National Football League, where collisions between ever bigger, faster and stronger players take a fearsome toll on joints, bones, muscles, connective tissue, even organs. Astonishingly, the Cleveland Browns' perennial Pro Bowl tackle has never missed a snap in 10 seasons.

That makes him among the most durable stars in a game of attrition. It also means he's taken the maximum cumulative beating to his cranium.

Thomas said in an interview last spring that he's begun to suffer lapses of short-term memory, which he readily acknowledges could be work-related. Or perhaps, he said, they're related to "my old age." He's 32.

Thomas' symptoms come amid building evidence that football, especially at its highest, most violent levels, inflicts degenerative brain damage on many who play it. The most common manifestation is a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence of the effects on some of those players — suicide, dementia, mood disorders, aberrant behavior. For some, it happens quickly.

The great linebacker Junior Seau, a prototypical NFL warrior, was just 43 when he shot himself in the chest in 2012, preserving his brain for medical testing that found he suffered from CTE. His family said his suicide capped a yearslong slide into depression.

We know enough now to link the violence inherent in football to CTE. But the science surrounding that link is still developing.

While changes in behavior and other symptoms can offer clues, CTE can only be established by studying the brain post-mortem. Once researchers started looking for it, they kept finding it.

Then in late July, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study of the brains of 202 former football players from all levels — high school, college, Canadian Football League, NFL. The picture isn't pretty.

JAMA reported that 177 of the 202 subjects, or 87 percent, were diagnosed with CTE. Of 111 brains of former NFL players studied, 110 were diagnosed with CTE — 99 percent.

It's likely that things aren't quite as bleak as they seem. Researchers caution the study, the largest of its kind, is prone to "selection bias" because the players and/or their families could have donated their brains because of behavior or other symptoms they noticed while they were living.

But the lead researcher, Boston University neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee, said the findings leave no doubt about the link between football and chronic brain damage. The challenge is quantifying the level of risk.

"It is no longer debatable whether or not there is a problem in football — there is a problem," McKee told The New York Times.

Two days after those findings were released, a 26-year-old offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, John Urschel, abruptly retired in favor of pursuing an advanced mathematics degree. A team source told ESPN that the decision was related to the study.

There's certainly no shortage of young men eager to hurl their bodies into football's grinder. But Urschel isn't the only player to walk away with a lot of clock left on his career.

In 2015, San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, who had been one of the NFL's top rookies the previous year, retired at age 24 after taking the measure of the odds. "I don't think it's worth the risk," he said then.

Once I might have disdained them for quitting on their potential. Now I applaud their good sense.

Joe Thomas, meanwhile, will take his chances. Thomas, a pro's pro, said he tracks his symptoms, hopes for the best and tries not to worry about it, reasoning that "most of the damage has probably been done already."

"To be able to live the lifestyle and provide for my family the way that football has been able to do, it's a trade-off that I'm willing to accept," he told ESPN.

I'll be rooting for him. I've pretty much given up watching boxing entirely, but football, especially the Browns and Penn State, still reliably lures me in front of the TV.

I sit there in the full knowledge that things will end badly for a substantial number of the men administering and absorbing beatings for my diversion. And I can't be the only one who wonders now and then what that says about me.

Pat Howard can be reached at 870-1721. Send email to pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhoward.